Quesadillas
Page 12
quesadilla
a flour or corn tortilla filled with cheese or other savoury ingredients, served folded in half. Common fillings include courgette flowers, huitlacoche and chicharrónes.
tacos de canasta
literally ‘basket tacos’, these are fried tortillas folded and filled with refried beans, potato and chorizo, or other ingredients, then steamed until soft. Traditionally they are made at home, then wrapped in a cotton cloth and placed in a basket so that they steam on the way to the street vendor’s stand.
tamal
a cornmeal cake stuffed with either savoury or sweet fillings, wrapped in plantain leaves or corn husks and steamed.
telenovela
similar to a soap opera, this is a television genre popular in Latin America, Spain and Portugal. The limited-run serials usually feature melodramatic stories of unrequited love, pantomime-style villains and fairy-tale endings. The most famous examples are the Colombian novela Yo soy Betty la fea, which was reimagined for a US audience as the hit TV show Ugly Betty, and Los ricos también lloran (The Rich Cry Too), in which a millionaire takes in a young orphan girl only to have his womanising son try to seduce her.
Author’s Notes
‘the Little Red Rooster’s men’: the Partido Democrático Mexicano (Mexican Democratic Party) or PDM, which we referred to as the Pee-Dee-Em so as to avoid babbling like a baby or spitting, was better known as the Little Red Rooster party. It was founded in 1979 and disappeared in 1997, when it failed to receive the necessary votes to remain on the electoral register. Its origins were in the National Synarchist Union, which in turn was modelled on the fascist Spanish Falange party. It controlled the council of Lagos de Moreno during the first half of the 1980s. The party’s logo was a little red rooster crowing, summoning its fellow believers to get up and go to five o’clock mass, because the early bird catches the worm, as they say, although this has never been proved.
Carlos Salinas’ government: Carlos Salinas de Gortari was president of Mexico from 1988 to 1994. He came to power after being ‘elected’ in a hotly disputed campaign against the left-wing candidate, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas. Suspicions of electoral fraud have not been dispelled to this day. The morning after election day, the computer system ‘went down’, giving rise to one of the most depressing footnotes in Mexican political history, the so-called ‘system failure’. During his presidency, Salinas implemented an extreme neoliberal programme notable for its privatisation of state companies. For most of his mandate he enjoyed international prestige, being applauded as a moderniser of the Mexican economy. No one saw the disaster that was coming. In December 1994, a few months after he left government, a serious economic crisis erupted, known to Mexicans as the ‘December Mistake’, which generated an international panic generally known as the ‘Tequila Effect’. The Salinist project had been to hide all of the country’s economic problems under the carpet. Salinas became the greatest of all the villains in Mexican politics. Suspicions of corruption during his government multiplied and his brother was jailed, accused of having assassinated the then party president. ‘Salinist’ remains a very serious insult.
the PRI: the acronym of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party) – no joke, this: we’re talking about an institutionalised revolution. This party emerged in 1929 with the aim of stopping the rural political bosses of the Mexican Revolution from killing each other. It governed Mexico until 2000, during which time it created and consolidated a political culture based on corruption, demagogy, co-option, fraud and a long list of suchlike. It has a chameleon-like ideology: it was left-wing in the 1930s, populist in the 1970s, neoliberal from the 1980s onwards … It returned to power in December 2012 (no joke either).
Mexico’s national team of the worst PRI-ist presidents in history
Carlos Salinas de Gortari (see above)
José López Portillo was president from 1976 to 1982, a period of perpetual crisis characterised by hyperinflation and continual devaluations. He was one of the most histrionic politicians in Mexican history (and that’s saying something). He is remembered for having said he would defend the peso ‘like a dog’. He said this on 4th February 1981 and by the 18th the exchange rate had gone from twenty-eight to seventy pesos to the dollar, which meant a devaluation of 250 per cent. This proves that dogs are dreadful economic strategists.
Luis Echeverría Álvarez was president from 1970 to 1976. He led a populist government that had perhaps the worst economic administration in the history of Mexico (and that’s saying something). He had a motivational slogan he used to repeat constantly, ‘onwards and upwards’, while the country foundered hopelessly, becoming ever more backward. He was responsible for giving a bad name to Mexico’s beautiful guayabera shirts, which he always wore.
Gustavo Díaz Ordaz was president from 1964 to 1970. Beyond his various ineptitudes, he will be remembered for the massacre of a number of students in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Tlatelolco, Mexico City, on 2nd October 1968.
•
Miguel de la Madrid Hurtado, president from 1982 to 1988 – the period in which this novel takes place – does not get a mention, not because he was a good president, but simply because he was a very boring guy.
Acknowledgements
The idea of Poland as nowhere is taken from Alfred Jarry, who wrote in his prologue to Ubu Roi: ‘Quant à l’action qui va commencer, elle se passe en Pologne, c’est-à-dire nulle part.’ Or: ‘As to the action which is about to begin, it takes place in Poland – that is to say, nowhere’ (trans. Beverly Keith and Gershon Legman, Dover, 2003).
Orestes recites fragments from the speech ‘A los pueblos engañados’ (‘To the deceived peoples’) by Emiliano Zapata and from ‘La suave patria’ (‘Sweet Motherland’) by Ramón López Velarde (in Song of the Heart: Selected Poems by Ramón López Velarde, trans. Margaret Sayers Peden, University of Texas Press, 1995).
The poor man’s quesadillas, and consequently all the categories of quesadilla, are inspired by my grandmother María Elena’s poor man’s enchiladas. How are you doing, Granny?
Rolando Pérez and his father, of the same name, are not Polish and bear no resemblance to the characters in this novel, but they are inseminators of cows and taught me all I know about this fascinating topic.
Andréia Moroni, Teresa García Díaz, Cristina Bartolomé and Iván Díaz Sancho read the first versions of the novel rigorously.
This book is also dedicated to my parents, María Elena and Ángel, and to my brothers and sisters, Luz Elena, Ángel, Luis Alfonso and Uriel.
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